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Inside a cramped laboratory in Shanghai, China, physicist Ruxin Li and colleagues are breaking records with the most powerful pulses of light the world has ever seen. At the heart of their laser, called the Shanghai Superintense Ultrafast Laser Facility (SULF), is a single cylinder of titanium-doped sapphire about the width of a Frisbee.

After kindling light in the crystal and shunting it through a system of lenses and mirrors, the SULF distills it into pulses of mind-boggling power.

In 2016, it achieved an unprecedented 5.3 million billion watts, or petawatts (PW) reports Science. The lights in Shanghai do not dim each time the laser fires, however. Although the pulses are extraordinarily powerful, they are also infinitesimally brief, lasting less than a trillionth of a second. The researchers are now upgrading their laser and hope to beat their own record by the end of this year with a 10-PW shot, which would pack more than 1000 times the power of all the world's electrical grids combined.

The group's ambitions don't end there. This year, Li and colleagues intend to start building a 100-PW laser known as the Station of Extreme Light (SEL).

By 2023, it could be flinging pulses into a chamber 20 meters underground, subjecting targets to extremes of temperature and pressure not normally found on Earth, a boon to astrophysicists and materials scientists alike.

The laser could also power demonstrations of a new way to accelerate particles for use in medicine and high-energy physics. But most alluring, Li says, would be showing that light could tear electrons and their antimatter counterparts, positrons, from empty space—a phenomenon known as "breaking the vacuum."

It would be a striking illustration that matter and energy are interchangeable, as Albert Einstein's famous E=mc2 equation states. Although nuclear weapons attest to the conversion of matter into immense amounts of heat and light, doing the reverse is not so easy. But Li says the SEL is up to the task. "That would be very exciting," he says.

As Spiderman’s Uncle Ben once famously said, “with great power comes great responsibility,” few responsibilities are more significant than that of being a father. And while parenting should be a shared responsibility, fatherhood, however, gives a different depiction of what raising children should look like.

Take these dads on our list for example. From innocently drawing eyebrows on your favorite daddy’s girl to provide them with more expression to using them as a plate, these funny dad jokes seem to have no end to them.#1 Two Kiwis

#2 Dad Left Alone With The Baby

#3 When Dad Is Giving Baby A Bath

#4 When Dad Gets The Kids Ready For School

#5 Problem Solved

#6 Ponytail Level: Dad

#7 My Husband May Have Gone Too Far In Dressing Our Son Like An Old Man For School Today

#8 She Wanted A Swing So He Became One

#9 I Left My Husband With The Baby For Ten Minutes#10 The Only Way My 3 Day-Old Daughter Would Fall Asleep. After Two Hours Of Carrying Her Around I Got Hungry